This is something that we've wanted to do for a long, long time, and now we're finally putting our plans in motion. Without further ado, let's just take a minute to explain what this tournament is all about.

Those of you who have been readers of Push Square for a long time may remember our Who Would Win Wednesday series. Every Wednesday, we would put out an article in which two PlayStation characters would face off in a popularity contest. The winner would be decided by community vote through a poll. It was a fun idea and it was well-received, but we sadly had to end the series due to time constraints.

The Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament, or UPCT, will take the Who Would Win Wednesdays format and apply it to an entire tournament. On a weekly basis, we'll be asking you to vote for your favourite PlayStation characters as they go head-to-head. Eventually, only one winner will be left standing.

The Rules

The Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament will feature 128 participants. These participants have been decided by the Push Square editorial team. (We've tried to keep things varied and fair.)

The Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament is a single elimination tournament. That means if a character is beaten, they're out. Gone. Done. Finished. The winner moves onto the next round.

The Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament features a randomised bracket. This essentially means that we put all of the participants into a pot and pulled them out at random.

Push Square will publish one Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament article per week (every Wednesday). Each article will feature at least one poll which the community can vote on. Voting will remain open until the following Wednesday.

What You Need to Do

If you want to have an impact on how the Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament plays out, all you need to do is make sure that you have a Push Square account and turn up every Wednesday to cast your vote(s).

The Tournament Bracket

We've created the Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament using Challonge.

We've included the full tournament bracket below. Every Wednesday, we'll make our way down the bracket. Once the first round is over, we'll be moving through the next, and so on.

In the interests of time, each Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament article will feature more than one poll -- at least until we reach the later rounds of the tournament. If we did just one match per week, the tournament would take over two years to complete!

(You can click the images to enlarge them.)

When Is the First Match?

The first Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament article will be published next week, on Wednesday the 25th October. A new article will be published every following Wednesday until we have a champion.

We hope that you're looking forward to our Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament as much as we are. Feel free to predict the eventual winner in the comments section below, and we'll hopefully see you next week.

Robert's been a dedicated PlayStation fan since the days of Tekken 2, and he still loves a good dust up. When he's not practising combos, he's usually getting lost in the latest 100-hour RPG, or, y'know, replaying The Witcher 3.

Big first round matchup between John Marston and Nathan Drake. Drake is like the face of playstation so hard to not see him winning but Marston is a well-developed, more subtle character that I love as well!

@Octane Yeah, the articles will have more detailed info on each character, specifically what games they've appeared in.

As for the 127 week thing: "In the interests of time, each Ultimate PlayStation Character Tournament article will feature more than one poll — at least until we reach the later rounds of the tournament. If we did just one match per week, the tournament would take over two years to complete!"

The plan is that we do four matches a week until the third or fourth round, then two matches until top 8. It'll still take months, but it's either that or have a much more limited pool of characters.

@Lonejester John Marston gets my vote. Nathan Drake is kind of cheesy and nowhere near as hardcore as John, and plus he's basically a mass murderer. (I know John can be a mass murderer if you choose to play Red Dead that way, but still)

This should be fun! I never take these seriously as you always end up with a match between two characters that have no right going up against each other, so the winner doesn't really mean much at that point. Like Sonic vs Luke Cage or something.

@Wesker yeah I'd agree that a daily matchup would be better than a few per week because it'd still last a long time but would keep the interest going every day. Appreciate it'd be more work for the staff here to keep the articles/polls going etc, but I'd be happy to help out if required?

Also I don't know what the daily traffic is like here though or how the vote count would compare daily to weekly

Yeah, how the Universe can randomize Big Boss and Solid Snake to go head-to-head in round one is beyond explanation. Perhaps in a way it is good to filter down some of the characters from the same series early on so the final rounds aren’t heavy on one particular game or series. But still, that’s crazy!

@Wesker@roe Nah, 24 hours wouldn't work — we need as many votes as possible, and each new article would eat into the last. A week gives us plenty of time to keep things ticking along and gives people a large window of opportunity to vote.

@Mega-Gazz This is something we mulled over for a while, but if we include characters like Batman, we questioned where we'd draw the line. Would we extend out to Marvel characters? Anime characters? It starts becoming more about geek culture rather than PlayStation, if that makes sense.

@ShogunRok that's cool, I'm happy enough with one set of votes a week anyway. It gives us a bit more time to appreciate each character and their franchise as well because you guys have done a good job of keeping the line up balanced with so many different game series included.

@roe Worth reiterating that we'll have more than one poll per article for a long time to begin with. We're looking at four matches per week until we get to the third or fourth round, then we'll be concentrating more on individual matches.

@Shogunrok Shame Hana from Fear Effect didn't make the bracket but glad you included Lady Maria and Suzuki though.When I saw Heihachi against Akuma and Big Boss against Solid Snake I was like "are you sure this isn't rigged"? Though it's appropriate that Clementine is up against an undead character

I think @PK_Wonder does have a point, as some of these match-ups are brutal for a round one. Eliminating these big names like either Drake or JM in the first round does tend to suck the wind out of the sails. You wouldn't have to seed the list, but take into account these type of big name match-ups so early. The drama doesn't get a chance to build up.

@ShogunRok People would absolutely complain, BUT it would be best to have made sure the (potential, projected) top 16 (no way to know for sure who they would have been) were as far away from each other as possible starting out. I wasn't suggesting you can or should account for all 128 characters, just the super heavyweights. Say Nathan Drake and Kratos would be top 2 under normal circumstances, they should be on opposite sides starting out no matter what. Everyone but Sly, R&C, Joel, Ellie, Sackboy, etc. can still be randomized. Otherwise you could in theory end up with a very obvious winner in an anticlimactic and lopsided grand finals. Something it's not to late to do to fix this issue would be making this a double elimination tourney. Would take a lot more time, but it would results in a better ranking as opposed to a 64-way tie for last place.

Either way I'm going to participate and think this will be fun. It's in general a good idea, I just would like to see a more accurate approach if we're going to say this is for the DEFINITIVE PlayStation characters.

An open draw is fine for this imo. At the moment you could be looking at a semi final lineup something like this:

Aloy v JoelEllie v Knack

And if Knack ends up beating those as well as whoever he's smashed his way through to get that far, then fair play to him and we'll get Sammy on the phone to Mark Cerny to make sure Knack 3 gets the green light.

All this is hypothetical of course, seeing as we all know Croc is winning this thing. #VoteCroc #LegendofthePSUPCT